Analyzing Office 365 Photo EXIF data using Power BI

In an earlier post, I wrote about how to mine the OCR data from Office 365 document folders using Power BI. During the research for that post I discovered that the photo EXIF data is also available for analysis from Office 365. I’ll show you how to get to it in this post.

What is EXIF data anyway?

Think of EXIF as special metadata for photos and with today’s cameras, records the settings of the camera as well as the location it was taken, if the camera has GPS. You can read more about the format here: https://photographylife.com/what-is-exif-data Many smart phones today automatically include the EXIF data when you take photos with your phone. This data is automatically extracted by Office 365 from photos when uploaded to a document library.

Why do I care about this?

Imagine you work for a company that does inspections. Your
inspectors use their phone to take photos of issues already. Wouldn’t it be great
to show the photos by location and related location data together on a report
page? This technique allows you to easily mine that EXIF data.

How do I get to it?

First, upload your images to a SharePoint document folder in
Office 365 and the OCR process will initiate automatically. I’ve had it take up to 15
minutes to process so you may need to be patient. You can do this via SharePoint
Mobile app if you are uploading mobile photos.

Second, from Power BI desktop, connect to the document folder using the SharePoint Online List connector. By doing so, you’ll get access to the correct column that contains the EXIF data. Once in the dataset, you can use Power Query M to parse the data and start analyzing.

Demo

In this video, I’ll show you how to access the EXIF data and what you can do with the data.